Cinco de Mayo

[KingSweden24]

"...state of nothing short of sheer panic. It was not hard to see, as an outside observer, why the events of 1914-19 - and, perhaps going back earlier to the Great Unrest of 1911-12 - were compared to Rome's hegemony-ending Crisis of the Third Century by former Cabinet minister turned historian bon vivant and Oxford don Sir Winston Churchill. For the rest of the world, Britain's hour of grave uncertainty seemed to represent the unraveling geopolitical status quo underwritten by a British India and the Royal Navy on the high seas to back up London's financial hard power since the Congress of Vienna, which opened the door to a sudden rush of Europe's Great Powers trying to fill the vacuum that concluded with the Munich assassination and eruption of the Central European War in March of 1919. To ordinary Britons, it appeared meanwhile that the golden era of Victorian Pax Britannica abroad was collapsing alongside the societal contract at home, and a sense of deep fear, ennui and anger penetrated deep into the British psyche in a way that historians are still trying to decipher in the context of the political turbulence of the late 1910s and the reactionary ascendance of William Joynson-Hicks the decade thereafter alongside a militant leftism that nearly tipped Britain into a syndicalist-fueled civil war. In many ways, it is a minor miracle that the British monarchy survived, and it is a testament to the popular, modest and plain George V who cast himself as the paragon of the virtuous and idealized British middle-class way of life that it did.

The twin crises of Ireland and India did reveal those who unlike the King did not meet the hour, first and foremost the Prime Minister Hugh Cecil and much of the British military establishment, two pillars of national ineptitude. The approaching one-year anniversary of the Curragh Mutiny was revealing on both ends; Cecil declined to decisively condemn it as his first year in Number 10 came to a close, choosing instead to "focus on the crises of the time," while the rift that had been torn through the heart of the British Army's officer class over the matter had essentially broken all cooperation down into competing fiefdoms. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, John French, was effectively not on speaking terms with Lord Kitchener in Ireland, who had to use Chief Secretary Lord Midleton to communicate with Whitehall; Generals Henry Wilson and William Robertson, meanwhile, were suspected of now openly aiding the UVF directly, up to passing secrets, and French's paranoia went so far as to believe that Intelligence Corps officers were covering for their friends out of Ulsterite sympathies. (It would, of course, be revealed years later that Wilson and Richardson's support for and participation in Ulster Unionist activities went above and beyond even what French believed). Cecil was loathe to sack French, however, considering the political fragility of the time and of his government; he relied on Liberal goodwill to pursue any policy, and appointing even more ardently Unionist officers to the General Staff as Ireland burned was regarded as a red line that Chamberlain would not tolerate.

The Punjab Mutiny thus struck London at precisely the time it was at its weakest in decades, with both the political and military establishment slouched in a crisis they were already hard-pressed to control and respond properly to. Though the worst-case scenario of the collapse of the British Raj within days that the Ghadarites who had launched the Mutiny unrealistically hoped for had not come to pass, the British Indian Army still faced daunting logistical challenges at a time when resources were streaming into Ireland and the numbers of European officers and enlisted men were at their thinnest in the Subcontinent in years. Further complicating matters on the ground in India was that out of the longstanding prejudiced theory of a "martial race," the Indian Army had disproportionately recruited Punjabis, Sikhs in particular but also Muslims, to its ranks, largely stemming from the absurd belief that Hindus were weak, effeminate and unsuited for combat. [1] This meant that the rebels had some of the most experienced active soldiers on their side amongst the mutinying divisions and could call on veterans of the Indian Army across Punjab to rally to the flag of Ghadar.

News on March 5th that the rebels had captured Amritsar, the holiest city in Sikhism, was the clarion call for outright panic at the India Office. Lord Peel, the Secretary of State for India, in the March 6th Cabinet meeting demanded bluntly that an expeditionary force be dispatched to India at once to put down the rebellion; while he had confidence in the adequacy of the Indian Army and its experienced Commander-in-Chief Sir Beauchamp Duff in preventing the fall of New Delhi and of the loose confederation of princely states of what is now Rajasthan to cut off any hope of the rebels marching south through the central Indian desert towards Bombay, his more immediate concern was something more akin to how the collapse of Spanish authority in the Philippines two decades earlier had begun: a massive uprising, successful defeated in the field, but then impossible to quench when it went underground in the backcountry and simmered consistently rather than burning fast and bright. India's geography of towering, cave-dotted mountains and deep forests would make stamping out an insurgency once established and credible with the natives virtually impossible, and Peel's fear - one he expressed in that meeting - was that an insufficient response in 1915 would mean that Britain would still be fighting a slow-boil Ghadarite enemy bleeding them dry in 1935.

This strategic nightmare opened all kinds of other doors that Cecil and his growing collection of sycophantic Whitehall mandarins preferred not to think about. Not only did Peel's scenario sound frighteningly plausible following the British experience in Ireland, but after the fall of Spanish Philippines and the emergence of the Republic of China and its radical Guomindang, or Nationalist Party, having a heartland in the south and southwest of China, the risk of an insurgency supported by foreign powers - China, France, Russia, whoever - was too real a risk to ignore. Despite mounting financial obligations in Ireland to sustain the British Army's patrols that were tipping the island closer to an outright police state, the Raj was the crown jewel of the British realms. Without India, there was no Empire.

Cecil thus on March 10th, 1915, [2] gave a speech in the Commons - at the same time that Ferozepur fell fully to the spreading Ghadar movement and hundreds flocked to their banners by the day - on the crisis in India and on the government's response. The man who with his infamous "Pith Hat Speech" had worsened Anglo-Indian relations the last time he'd sat in government on the heels of the Bombay Police Riots of 1907 now was called upon to try to solve a debacle partly of his own making, and while the address certainly was not one of the great oratories of Westminster's long and storied history or in the repertoire of the talented speaker who gave it, it succinctly got the job done. "The British Empire stands upon the brink," he declared to a skeptical Commons. "This must be an hour of comradery - we shall stand together, or we shall fall separately." The address did, understandably, not go over well in an Ireland where ordinary Irishmen were curious who exactly this "we" was who was meant to stand "together" considering the increasingly arbitrary and radicalizing behavior of the Army there, but the call was to the entire Empire. Much more so than the internal conflict in Ireland, what was happening in India was an open, full-throated revolt against British authority that had seen Britons slaughtered and deserved a response in kind. [3]

The expeditionary force Cecil was demanding to secure India would thus draw from across the Empire - it would take in men from not only the Home Islands but also Canada, South Africa and Australia, as well as any African or Hong Kong Chinese who might be keen to volunteer. It would be an enormous, expensive undertaking, but keeping India in the Empire warranted it. Underlining the gravity of the moment, Cecil's government appointed Lord Kitchener as the commander-in-chief of this British Expeditionary Force and indeed the combined forces of the Dominions that would arrive with him, removing him from Ireland; as Cecil acknowledged in a letter shortly before his death, even then he understood "if we chose India, it would be possible to in some form keep Ireland; if we chose Ireland, it would be impossible to keep either." With Kitchener's deployment to India along with his capable deputy and favourite Macready, a replacement had to be found as the right-hand of the Duke of Clarence and Lord Midleton in Dublin, and for that task French settled on General Sir Archibald "A.J." Murray, his longstanding aide-de-camp thought to be more trustworthy on the question of Ulster than the Director of Military Training, General Sir William Robertson, who would be himself receiving a command in crucial India before long.

In that sense, the Irish Civil War had entered a newer, stranger period, one in which while escalating just across the Irish Sea from Britain and dominating British headlines, was definitively on the backburner for British officialdom in terms of attention paid and military talent and resources dispatched to combat it..." [4]

- The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-1924

[1] This was a genuinely held British attitude, dating back decades (Gandhi volunteered for active combat duty in the Boer War partially to help disprove this, for instance). I couldn't find a good way to slide this into the narrative, but the factor of the Punjabi Sikhs being the most loyal in 1857 also led to them being considered the most favored for Army service by the British thereafter. Ironic!
[2] Incidentally my dad's birthday - though of course not in 1915
[3] Of course, what the Unionists got up to at Carrickfergus could be considered an "open, full-throated revolt against British authority," but they're White Civilized Protestants (TM) and support Cecil's government while the Ghadarites are those Brown Savage Colonials so, alas...
[4] We'll go more in-depth on the ground in India in the sequel thread, I wanted to make sure I fully covered the destabilizing political effect that Ghadar has on London and Ireland alike

 

[KingSweden24]

"...that the COM had not simply overlapped with the CGTM but often paralleled it as more than simply a union but an organizational pole for labor in general, with its own paramilitaries. The Mexican practice of recruiting battalions by neighborhood - which even the Confederacy had figured out didn't work, and abolished the so-called "pals' battalions" of hometown or university friends serving together - meant that working-class men from similar barrios were clumped together at training and thus either already radicalized but now with rifles in their hands or cross-radicalized by syndicalist workers who they had just met. These groups got nicknamed the "Red Battalions" by their commanding officers due to the syndicalist views of many of the enlisted, a name that stuck and became a point of pride for the men themselves and COM's leaders such as Antonio Diaz Soto, Lazara Gutierrez, and Manuel Sarabia as well as their allies in the Magonist party, who while not organizers of COM saw it as the most key institution that could bring about anarchism on the ground itself.

The Revolt of the Red Battalions that erupted on April 14th, 1915 was not as organized as many of its detractors thought, but indeed did catch much of the ruling class by surprise. One major mistake that the conservative elite had made in the previous two years (beyond not understanding how unpopular the war had become with not just the average Mexican but many in the Army and Legislative Assembly as well) was its unshakeable and incredibly wrong belief that Maderismo had represented some kind of personality cult around the personage of Francisco I. Madero and if he were simply removed from power, then the radical current in Mexican politics he embodied would be removed with him. How otherwise clever, ruthless men like Leon de la Barra, Creel and Molina had already forgotten - or actively ignored - that it was Librado Rivera and Jesus Magon who had done more to bring down Madero's government from the inside than any of their conspiracies remains a mystery to Mexican historians, and this willful blindness would soon cost them everything. News that five battalions had erupted in revolt in training camps near Aguascalientes reached the capital after the news had reached other battalions, which similarly declared that they would not go fight. By late in the evening of the 14th, an emergency meeting of the COM was convened by Diaz Soto, who whipped the votes for all members of the Casa to immediately go on a solidarity strike in favor of the Red Battalions; the next day, seeking to not be outdone, the slightly-less-revolutionary CGTM voted similarly, though many locals abstained.

The Revolt was thus the largest civil unrest in Mexico in thirty years, since the Revolt of the Caudillos. By the 16th, not only were ten army battalions now in open revolt and threatening to march on Mexico City, but between a hundred to two hundred thousand laborers had started a general strike, bringing much of the Altiplanense economy to a grinding halt. The government flailed for days, debating whether to declare all strikers traitors, ban labor unions, or force the strikers back to work at gunpoint; the Emperor, for his part, urged caution as Mexico spiraled towards unrest at the height of war..."

- The Other Mexico

"...rumors have persisted for years that the dreadnought Chapultepec was anchored in Veracruz in case the Imperial Family needed to be evacuated. The revolt's leaders, Ricardo Magon and Antonio Diaz Soto, badly overplayed their hand in the first days of the uprising, however, in demanding the abolition of the monarchy, the nationalization of all church and government property, and the imposition of a syndicalist workers' republic as their first set of principles, anchoring themselves "in the tradition of champions of the people such as Benito Juarez and Miguel Hidalgo!" Many radicals chafed at their champion Madero's name not being included in the pantheon of Mexican revolutionary heroes that Magon and Diaz Soto praised, and Jesus Magon - nobody's idea of a sober moderate and brother of Ricardo - proclaimed his solidarity with "the concerns of the worker" but declined to actively "join arm-in-arm upon the barricades," as Librado Rivera icily phrased it. While the proclamation of independent labor unions and land reapportionment were hugely popular with the Mexican street and suggested that the Red Battalions stood shoulder to shoulder with the peasant rebellions of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata that were burning in North and South, such winning policy was drowned out by Magon's clearly-stated aim to dismantle the entirety of the Mexican state to be replaced with his particularly anarchic vision of Jacobinism. The threat to the Second Empire's survival had been very real, as similar events in Chile had shown and would show even further in the years to come; the disorganized ambition of the Red Battalions severely damaged their ability to act on that threat.

The 2nd Reserve, Bernardo Reyes' private army stationed in and around the capital, was deployed on the 17th when it was clear the situation was out of control, and Maximilian shuddered as he heard gunfire from the windows of the Chapultepec. Memories of wondering if the rebel army of the Northern Caudillos - whose grievances were not dissimilar, in some ways, to what the Red Battalions demanded now - was about to march into Mexico City flooded back, as did the Zocalo riots from early in his reign. It was all coming full circle, it seemed, the sins of the past returning to smite him now. Reyes was clever in how he approached putting down the revolt, however - his soldiers did not shoot unless lethally threatened, and he himself spoke to many strike leaders and encouraged them to stand down. By the time news arrived that two loyal regiments had put down a Red Battalion near Potosi but had given amnesty to those who surrendered, the strike started faltering once it was clear that the average Mexican was not going to rise up in the name of syndicalism. The leaders of the Revolt had overstepped, and with it lost everything.

That was not to say that they had been entirely ineffective. The government was humiliated and looked as craven to the general public as many had always thought, and the more moderate Reyes had only further burnished his reputation. It was the first time that a general strike had actually brought a response as equals, as opposed to the mere nuisance of the autumn of action in late 1911. And, perhaps most importantly, Reyes had had to divert several regiments to quell revolts across the Altiplano in addition to mobilizing his 2nd Reserve, badly crippling the war effort in the North just as the Yanquis made their latest push on Los Pasos and Chihuahua..."

- Maximilian of Mexico

"...the COM was abolished by law, and the leaders of the CGTM were scattered to the wind. Diaz Soto fled the capital and, somehow, found his way to Havana, where he would live in exile for many years; Jesus Magon wound up in the United States, settling eventually in St. Louis until his death under mysterious circumstances in 1920. Others were not so lucky; both Ricardo Magon and Librado Rivera were captured and executed publicly, as a warning against ever rising against the government again, with the excuse of it being wartime sedition only acting as something of a smokescreen.

To Morones and men like him, though, the annihilation of the leadership ring that had brought down Madero and represented the first generation of radical syndicalism in Mexico presented them with an opportunity; there was now a swirling vacuum for general leadership of the Mexican labor movement and political left in general that would be hard for men so associated with peasant revolts like Villa or Zapata to fill. Mexican labor was not broken by any means, it would just have to find a new vehicle and a new arrangement for the future, one which would present itself more quickly than any of its leaders either on the moderate or radical end anticipated..."

- El Jefe de Jefes: Luis Napoleon Morones' Mexico [1]

[1] New character here - an important one.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...when asked why he thought the Socialists had never been able to fully supplant the Democrats as the dominant party of the American center-left, longtime Milwaukee Congressman and Mayor Carl Zeidler quipped, "Because they steal half our ideas for themselves and then beat us over the head with the other half." Zeidler was speaking in jest, though feeding perhaps in part to the long-running (and as both Democrats and Socialists would be quick to tell you, woefully inaccurate) sentiments amongst more conservative voters in both major parties that progressive Democrats were simply "Socialist Lite" - but there is some truth to the idea.

No political party or movement, of course, can lay claim to any policy platform or idea in a world where trademarked platforms are not a thing. American and indeed world democratic history is littered with politicians cribbing good suggestions from their opponents and rebranding them as their own, or running against a policy only to support it once in office and realizing how much political capital had to be spent repealing it. As sewer socialism took off across American cities with Socialist candidates attempting to position themselves as a "third position" alternative to conservative, pro-business Liberals and corrupt, patronage machine Democrats, they found themselves time and time again pipped to the mantle of reform by progressive Democrats who saw an idea they liked, scooted it two notches closer to the center, and then presented it as their own, particularly to trade and craft unions that were more reflexively conservative and still associated Socialists with IWW radicalism or semi-literate immigrants.

A perfect case in point was the example of Edward Dunne, an Irish-American lawyer who had served a two-year term as Mayor of Chicago from 1905 to 1907. While a creature of the Democratic machine, he was nonetheless a Hearstian progressive who pushed for reform of public bookkeeping and municipal ownership of public utilities and streetcars. Upon his return to office in 1911, he had transformed even further in the age of the Bergerite Socialist, and now ran on city-built public housing, immediately municipalizing the streetcars rather than buying them line by line as he had previously proposed, a ban on corporate donations to candidates, public rubbish collection and a wholesale reform of the city primary system as well as suffrage for women in municipal elections - in other words, much of the Socialist agenda, to the point that the Socialist candidates in 1915 had little to run on. Dunne's successful landslide reelection during the war seemed only to further prove him right on policy and was followed by Chicago becoming the largest city in America to pass a land value tax of the Georgist kind, a longstanding priority of progressives and many Socialists.

This posed a conundrum for the Socialist Party. Their greatest success - as evidenced in places like Milwaukee, Seattle, and occasionally Minneapolis or New York - was typically at the municipal level, for a variety of reasons. It was easier to meet voters one-on-one, concerns around high utilities, crowded housing and vindictive ward bosses or supervisors were directly in the wheelhouse of Bergerites, and it was harder to be demagogued against as revolutionaries in the mold of Haywood with a competent, straightforward and publicly-minded city administration. For Reform Democrats to capture that mold led to what Zeidler also quipped was the "Me, Too" Socialist - the candidate who was invariably left sighing, "Me, too" when it came to supporting various policies that Democrats had probably already suggested.

Further damaging Socialist abilities to break through from their urban strongholds in much of the country was what Berger termed the "five-party" system that seemed to briefly have emerged during the strange political hour of the Great American War: there were more than merely Liberals and Democrats but rather conservative and progressive-reformist wings in each, suggesting two parties stitched together out of factions together for expediency than agreement, polarized on lines of class, religion, ethnicity and geography rather than ideology. This put the Socialists at a disadvantage - not only were they the only truly ideological party from top to bottom (though certainly with their own factionalism), and thus easily painted as radical rather than as pragmatic, but they also did not have a "sidecar," as Berger named it, of either an ideologically similar faction of the other party to support them on policy, or the ideologically dissimilar faction of the same party to come to their aid when needed rather than see a seat lost to the opposite coalition. The municipal reform revolution was in full swing even as the Progressive Era continued its wartime lull; it was not necessarily in a way that benefitted the partisans most committed to it..."

- The American Socialists

(This was a weird, complicated entry designed more to showcase the kind of cool Georgist shit Dem mayors are getting up to and name-checking Ed Dunne, who of course IOTL lost his 1911 Mayoral primary but was elected Governor of Illinois a year later and is the reason Illinois passed women's suffrage in 1913)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...consistent stream of emigres to Brazil, in particular, but also to the United States (Boston and Providence being favored destinations), Mexico, Canada and to a much lesser extent the Confederate States. The remittances of these emigres was an important part of the deeply indebted Portuguese government's efforts to keep the economy afloat; by 1915, when the slow-rolling financial crisis that would engulf Lisbon within a year started, it remained not just the poorest country in Western Europe on a per-capita basis but also its most remarkably indebted, with the share of the national debt owed theoretically by every man, woman and child in Portugal equivalent to what it would take them thirty years to make - and that was just the outstanding principal.

Portugal's deepening political and economic malaise in the mid-1910s was exacerbated by a stiffly unresponsive political class, which for decades had operated in what was on paper one of the more liberal, open and democratic societies in Europe but which in practice was governed by a practice known as Rotativismo - rotation. Like the Turno Pacifico that would define Argentine politics for sixty years of the 20th century or the rough coalition of establishment parties that passed Cabinet roles around amongst themselves in Germany, the Rotativismo was a way for Portuguese elites to share power and eliminate the kind of epochal crises that had plagued the country a century earlier between liberals and conservatives, with the two groupings organized under the banners of the Progressist Party and Regenerator Party, respectively.

For some time, this had worked - while politicians who understood the system and had the trust of the king, Carlos I, were around. The deaths of reformist conservative Regenerator leader Ernesto Hintze Riberio in 1907 and the aged but experienced Progressist statesman Jose Luciano de Castro in 1914 had left both parties without their most talented Prime Ministers; as it fell upon the King to dissolve government and appoint a new Cabinet upon the following election, and in doing so choose the Prime Minister, limiting the available candidates who could actually try to handle the deep problems facing Portugal was no easy task. Further, the Rotativismo had peacefully transferred power by design but created something of a duopolistic political oligarchy now unresponsive to the fairly limited electorate of men who paid taxes; republican and socialist sentiment, often not mutually exclusive, had grown dramatically, especially in urban electorates.

Much of the Portuguese debt was tied up in Portugal's remarkably vast Austral-African territories, which spanned across the waistline of the Dark Continent from Loanda on the west coast to Lourenco Marques on the east - a swath of land famously identified in the Berlin Conference of the 1880s as Portugal's "Pink Map." There was a tremendous amount of value to what Portugal controlled; the Shire Highlands along Lake Malawi's southern shores were regarded as excellent agricultural land, there was thought to be gold and diamond deposits rivaling those of the Witwatersrand in the basin of the Zambezi, and of course there was, deep in the heart of Austral-Africa on the southern border of Belgium's infamous Congo colony, the protectorate kingdom of Katanga, which mining engineers were only just starting to realize had some of the richest deposits of all manner of ores possibly in the world.

Comparisons between the Congo and the Austral-Africa are worthwhile. Both were owned by "minnows" in the European sense, both were financed by extractive economies vulnerable to the boom-and-bust cycles of global trade, and both were deeply in debt. The difference, of course, was that the Congo Free State was on paper at least a possession solely of the Belgian King and something of a public embarrassment to the Belgian public with several scandals regarding the horrific conditions under which natives worked to produce rubber and other export goods to finance the Free State's jaw-dropping levels of leverage; the Austral-Africa, by contrast, was a possession of the Portuguese state and regarded as the natural evolution of what were essentially Portuguese provinces and protectorates that had existed in Africa for centuries and were held in the same regard as Goa, Macau and Timor, all legacies of Portugal's golden age of the 16th and 17th centuries, when they had ruled the waves and all trade with Asia.

So by the mid-1910s, when Austral-Africa sank deeper and deeper into debt, it was the Portuguese state that was on the hook for the cost, and unlike the vapid and cruel Belgian royal family which simply mortgaged more and more of their colonial prized possession to French banks, the Portuguese had to take out ever-more expensive loans now in competition with the North and South American countries trying to leverage London's vast gold reserves to finance the Great American War tearing its way across the Western Hemisphere, and also raise taxes while cutting what meagre spending the Portuguese government laid out on its populace, which was generally dependent on the powerful Catholic Church for hospitals, schools and public welfare. The royal tour of Carlos and Crown Prince Luis Filipe through the summer and fall of 1914 was remarked upon, behind closed doors, of having the appearance of two paupers wandering Europe looking for a desperate last-minute loan, and despite the high esteem that both men were held in by most European courts for their amiability and diplomatic nature, their mission was largely a failure. Portugal could not hope to keep their colonies, at least not the whole of them, and be financed by European states eyeing the fresh, wouned prize of Austral-Africa for themselves.

In 1915, a consortium of British banks finally said to Portugal that enough was enough - they would refinance Portugal's existing loans to a lower interest rate, but that would be it. Adding insult to injury, the British derisively suggested that this reworked term of borrowing was done only out of goodwill for London's "oldest ally," and it was rumored in Portuguese merchant houses that the deal was only brokered thanks to Princess Patricia, the Crown Prince's wife, being a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. This came at exactly the time when the pace of remittances slowed thanks to the tighter budgets in the Americas due to the war. As a result, Portugal was staring down the barrel of a nasty set of circumstances: it could either dramatically raise taxes, or it could suffer its third sovereign default in the last twenty years. The Portuguese debt crisis of 1915-16 unraveled slowly but surely, and with the geopolitical implications of a Portuguese default on its debt and her Austral-Africa slipping into somebody else's heightened, marked an important inflection point on colonial and imperial tensions across Europe less than a year after France and Germany were at one another's throats over the Ubangi-Shari..." [1]

- Path of Darkness: Europe's Illiberal Hour

[1] Its hard to find alternative Portuguese PMs for this era not named "Joao Franco," and since I don't want the Portuguese monarchy to entirely fail I'm keeping him far the fuck away from power, so apologies if we didn't get into Portuguese internal politics much. The gist of it basically is be careful what you wish for - Portugal got her Pink Map ITTL (as some of you may remember from back in the 1890s), but it lacks the manpower, money or wherewithal to actually sustain such a massive possession. I couldn't find a good way to incorporate this into the narrative, but especially in the interior Portugal is as a result a pretty hands-off colonial power, because they can't afford to be hands-on

 

[KingSweden24]

"...regarded the fighting of late March and much of April 1915 as possibly the most savage along the Inner Line in the entire campaign. While both sides did their best to rotate fresh troops into the defensive trenches, it remained the case that many of the divisions brought off the immediate first line were kept nearby, with Confederates typically getting a mere two weeks leave in nearby Murfreesboro rather than back home, for fear that they might otherwise desert. Conditions in Nashville had gotten bleaker and bleaker, too; the Yankees had brought in specially-built long-range artillery that was meant not for precision but to randomly lob high-explosive shells or chlorine gas canisters behind the Inner Line for psychological purposes, with the risk that they could land anywhere; sometimes, spent shell casings were fired into Nashville just to flatten whatever they landed on and to demonstrate that nowhere behind the defenses was safe. Nashville was closer to a ghost town than a city, with perhaps as much as ninety percent of her prewar free population having been evacuated; slaves were seized by the Army and put to tasks of war, often dealing with sorting through dead bodies to identify them and prepare them for burial.

Something had to break eventually, and the break came on April 26th when the Inner Line finally showed her first crack at Gallatin, about forty kilometers northeast of the Tennessee State House and roughly halfway between the smaller industrial towns of Hendersonville and Hartsville. The wooded hills of the Highland Rim had by April of 1915 been reduced to little more than dead gray no man's land, pockmarked with impact craters, studded with the smoldering black stumps of what once were trees and littered with the occasional corpse that one of the combatants had been unable to safely collect. The destruction of the area's tree cover had, of course, made it much easier to identify from high ground and airplane the weak points in the Confederate line, and Farnsworth, mere days before he was to be cycled back and relieved of command, had deduced that the relatively low hills just north of Gallatin were the weak link in the Inner Line's chain of earthworks, minefields and pillboxes supporting the multiple layers of trenches.

Therefore, on the early morning of April 26th, an unholy artillery fair rained down on this segment of the Line, known as Section D-IV in Yankee planning maps, followed by a thrust straight through it by three Hellfighter regiments that managed to do what no offensive into the maw of the Line had done yet - punch their way through and onto the other side. Despite sustaining grievous casualties, the Hellfighters cracked the defenses at what was once the hamlet of Graball and before they knew it were on the road to Gallatin, with two corps under Lenihan directly to their rear. Lenihan's famed aggressiveness and thirst for high-paced offensives had made him the natural choice to lead American forces into the Battle of Gallatin; that he wanted to seize Nashville before he got sent to Virginia in mid-May to satisfy his ego certainly had something to do with the matter, too. By late in the day on the 27th, Lenihan could see the rooftops of Gallatin, less than two kilometers away; on the 28th, his men fought their way in.

The capture of Gallatin was a disaster for the Confederacy. Not only did it place American troops behind the Inner Line for the first time, it cut off the most direct route along the southern slopes of the Highland Rim to the eastern anchor of the Line in Hartsville, forcing Buck's supplies and men to instead be routed via Lebanon, south of the Cumberland. It gave Lenihan and the troops streaming in behind him once he sent word of his successful breakthrough all of the operational initiative - they could backfill their left flank and march on Hendersonville along the right bank of the Cumberland towards Nashville, they could hold fast and allow reinforcements to swing east and capture Hartsville, or they could cross the Cumberland and continue their effort to cut the Confederate logistics network in half by threatening Lebanon. Unless they were repulsed, and soon, Nashville would collapse.

Buck pulled regiment after regiment off their defenses in the Line to be marched into the eastern sector of the operational theater, electing to concentrate a corps in Hartsville and two in Lebanon; he did this under mobile light artillery fire brought into the "breach" at Graball that could penetrate deep into the Nashville Basin and strafing from airplanes, most lethally the new C-6 model from Curtiss-Wright Company which had built long guns into the fuselage to eliminate the need of a gunner, guns that fired 20mm ammunition rounds (a limited number, of course) and thus allowed for maximum destruction upon dive runs. Harried under this breaking fire, Buck's attempt to arrest the attempted breakout by Lenihan was considerably slowed.

Aware from reconnaissance where Buck was trying to meet him, Lenihan elected to draw Confederate defenses further from central Nashville and on April 30th crossed the Cumberland; on the morning of the 1st, both of his corps as well as two regiments of Hellfighters were successfully across, with an additional two corps now having plugged the gap behind him to defend his rear and prevent an attack from either Hartsville or Hendersonville. The Confederate position was, quite simply, in total collapse..."

- Bleeding Heartland: The Midlands Front of the Great American War

 

[KingSweden24]

"...both President Smith and General Scott had, at different times near the start of the war, quite infamously boasted that the Confederacy would "never require" the imposition of conscription upon its male population, for two reasons that seem absurd in hindsight. The first was that the martial bravery and noble cavalier society of the Confederate man would result in such mass volunteering that there would never be a lack of willing men to head to the front; the second, of course, was the assumption that the war would be over within six months in the absolute worst case scenario.

By late April of 1915 - nearly twenty months later, not six, with no end to the war in sight - it was obvious that both of these assumptions were grievously incorrect. This was not to say that Confederate men were shirking their duty, simply that the rate of volunteers had slowed down dramatically after the heady early days and the number of deserters had ballooned. This was no longer the age of exciting, gallant breakthroughs such as plunging through Maryland to march on Philadelphia but a grim slog that every soul south of the Ohio had heard about in excruciating detail from survivors, even if civilians often had a hard time understanding what exactly was happening on the front and still had a disproportionately positive about the war, even as Confederate public war aims narrowed further to simply pushing the Yankee out of their territory (wholly possible in Virginia, at least) and keeping their rights on the Mississippi.

Unspoken regarding conscription, already imposed in Mexico and Argentina and now being actively debated in the United States for the first time, was a fear in the Confederate hierarchy that it was an admission of weakness, but now the political dynamic in Richmond had shifted markedly with the rise of the Alliance for Victory in the Senate as the chief power base in January and its slow spread to the House and then state legislatures; Thomas Martin's soft putsch had been a striking success in that effect. Martin was a canny political operator who in the space of a matter of months managed (with a great deal of help from the newspaper empire associated with ultra-hawkish Secretary of State Hoke Smith, who effectively abandoned the President as a political ally) to recast the entire conversation around the war. Conscription was no longer cowardly; it was now declared by Martin and his mouthpieces that it had been cowardly not to impose it, and not demanding further dedication to the war effort from the public through a general draft was what was costing Dixie the victory she had been due. It has often been remarked upon in academic studies of Confederate political culture that it is enormously consensus driven (Martin's political movement was, after all, called the National Consensus), but that said consensus can often change rapidly and suddenly, to the point of appearing to shift overnight. In part, this is because the high-consensus nature of the system itself threatens the political careers and sometimes even lives of those who go against it. It is much easier to change one's mind on an opinion that was held the day before than be out of a job, even if one's new opinion is the polar opposite of what one believed the day before. [1]

The position in support of conscription thus shifted enormously in the first three months of 1915 from being essentially a fringe position to passing overwhelmingly at Martin's behest, carried by huge bipartisan margins in Congress, and Smith, the lamest of lame ducks, quietly acceded to it. Since volunteer numbers were not that low, just not sufficient to sustain the Confederate Army's necessary size, conscription was initially pitched as a way to "top-up" the Confederacy's forces; disastrously, its implementation was left largely to the states to backfill their State Militias, but at the demand of the national government.

This meant that the success of Confederate conscription largely depended on how favorable towards Richmond any given state Governor and legislature was. Most states, regardless of if they were controlled by ex-Tillmanite Democrats, by Bourbons, or in most cases some hybrid of the two, were amenable, with one major exception - Texas. The Texas Party that controlled that state's legislature was already in an all-but-declared political war against its Alliance governor, James "Pa" Ferguson, as well as its Bourbon Senator, Charles Culberson, over patronage appointments. The decision to impose conscription upon a state that already felt ignored compared to its vast population and economic importance to the Confederacy outraged and radicalized the Texas street; while there were draft riots in many cities, the worst were the Dallas Draft Riots, in which six people were killed and dozens of businesses destroyed. The decision of the Texas Legislature to seek independence later in 1915 can be largely traced to the conscription decision, especially as news emerged later in the year of the sons of wealthy planters who had refused to volunteer paying their way into a draft deferral by way of hiring poorer men to "go to die" in their place, further casting the whole ordeal as a rich man's war fought at the yeomanry's expense..."

- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100

[1] Notice this with OTL Southern politics. One day, much of the South just woke up and went "Yup, we're not Democrats anymore" and within a few years the old Dixiecrat hegemony was gone; some states went from supermajority D legislatures to supermajority R legislatures in the span of a few cycles. Notice this also with segregation; Southern pols fought tooth and nail to preserve segregation, then ten years later were appointing lots of Black patronage positions. (George Wallace in the 1960s versus George Wallace in the late 1970s/early 1980s is an infamous example of this). A lot of them claimed there was some "come to Jesus" moment, but c'mon.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...reputation as a vain, glory-seeking publicity hound. While Hobson's brief tenure as a Congressman from his home state of Alabama had indeed seen him be one of the more flamboyantly press-friendly and photogenic politicians in the Confederacy and thus something of a minor celebrity, this reputation is wholly unearned. The arrogant nature of the Confederate military-political establishment atop both the Army and Congress that often threw caution to the wind and was convinced of its own superiority had never really plagued the more cautious Naval Department, and Hobson was, like his mentor and direct superior Admiral Washington, aware of the CSN's strengths and weaknesses in open combat. His command of the Combined Fleet in the events of late April and early May of 1915 certainly deserve scrutiny, but he had resisted calls to stage more assertive and risky operations and had appreciated the protection that the otherwise hawkish Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels had provided his officers over the prior two years. For that reason, it is not only scrutiny that Admiral Richmond Hobson warrants, but a fair analysis of why he made the choices he made both in the strategic context of the battle but also in the context of pragmatic and careful Confederate naval culture.

Hobson was well aware that while the Combined Fleet was the strongest naval force the United States had faced yet, it was still outgunned and he risked facing a considerably superior foe if he allowed the III Squadron to join up with Task Force C, which he still believed to be in the Caribbean in the vicinity of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands rather than where it really was just east of the Bahamas. Hobson's plan, a sound one based on the information he had available to him, was to place his Combined Fleet between the two American fleets to attempt to prevent their union and, ideally, defeat Belknap's III Squadron in detail after pushing it northeast, away from the Confederate coast. Hobson suspected (incorrectly) that Belknap's weapons stores would be depleted after his raids against Virginia Beach, Wilmington and now Charleston, and if he could press the enemy out into open seas he could either force it to have to go around his position, further south, or back to port if it were unwilling to face him. On paper, with the intelligence available to Hobson at that time about Murdock's own movements, it was not an entirely unsound plan.

The problem for Hobson of course was that Murdock's fleet was nowhere near the eastern Great Antilles anymore, but rather about fifty kilometers east of San Salvador Island in the Bahamas and headed north-northwest to intercept him. Confederate Sea Wolves in the Caribbean that had been following the Yankee vessels had either been sunk or lost sight of Murdock's formation, and Confederate radio-telegraphy communications at sea were of considerably lower quality than those of their American counterparts. This meant that Hobson, who figured he had about five days to sink Belknap's squadron or drive it back into a US port before Murdock appeared to ruin his plans, actually had about two..."

- Hell at Sea: The Naval Campaigns of the Great American War

"...the maneuver by Hobson up along the Florida coast brought him up to the port of Savannah a day after Belknap's raid against it, and once Belknap was confident he had the Confederate fleet in sight dispatched one of his submarines southwards to act as courier and report to Murdock in the Bahamas the forces that Hobson was at sail with. Belknap and his commanders had considered Hobson's likeliest goals in the battle and figured that he, as they would in his situation, would attempt to aggressively force a battle near Confederate shores where support could be found either from a wolfpack of submarines in wait or coastal artillery, or chase them out into high sea. Wanting to put off the first option for now, Belknap elected to draw Hobson out into the Atlantic and closer to US ports while letting Murdock position himself to capture Hobson from behind. Accordingly, when Hobson briefly sent two vessels into his supply base at Port Royal Sound halfway between Charleston and Savannah, he revealed where his supply stores were, and Belknap quickly sent another submarine to head to Murdock's approaching fleet and then lie in wait at Port Royal Roads, off the headland of Hilton Head Island.

Belknap's gambit began on April 26th, 1915, as he turned northeast near the state border of the Carolinas and steamed out to see, with Hobson in pursuit. The Confederate admiral was reluctant to force a battle in the mid-Atlantic in case of a late spring storm but nonetheless followed at a distance, reserving his ability to turn about and return to port if he needed to. On the 28th, Belknap, worried that Hobson was about to end his pursuit, maneuvered southeast suddenly, towards Bermuda. Hobson, confused, decided to follow, slowing down slightly but just enough to keep Belknap in view. At Bermuda, Belknap showed the flag to two very perplexed Royal Navy cruisers and asked to purchase refueling supplies in harbor, a request which neutral Britain begrudgingly accepted, as their telescopes showed only a small Confederate fleet in the distance. [1] Subsequently, on May 1st, 1915, Belknap sailed out of Bermuda and in the direction of Hobson's fleet, attempting to force it southwards. This operation was successful, with a limited exchange of fire in what is known as the Bermuda Skirmish, done less than a hundred kilometers from the island's shore.

Hobson was convinced at this point that Belknap's run for Bermuda was a trick meant to lure him into a trap at sea and after disengaging from his quarry immediately steamed westwards, concerned that he had burned precious time. His goal was to restock at Port Royal after a journey of slightly less than four days and then re-engage with Belknap, who he could see following him from just out of gun range to his north, and this time force a decisive fight somewhere along the coast after Belknap had gamely avoided giving Hobson what he wanted.

The Confederate-Brazilian Combined Fleet did not realize, however, that Murdock had moved his formations - in three columns, commanded by himself, Admiral William Rodgers, and the newly-promoted Commander Franklin Roosevelt - to a point approximately a hundred kilometers off of Savannah, allowing him to rapidly respond to any movement by Hobson towards any of the three major ports in the area at Charleston, Savannah or Saint Augustine or, as it so happened, cut him off ahead of Port Royal Roads..."

- The Fourth Branch: A Comprehensive History of the United States Navy

[1] My understanding is that naval doctrine of the time was for neutral countries to be friendly to military vessels that arrived under the flag of peace to their ports, but I'm not sure. Anyways, they do it here.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Dartnell formally signed the ceasefire agreement in view of a line of Argentine officers and then shook all of their hands in turn; for the first night in weeks, Los Andes was silent without the thunder of shells whistling down from the hills above it, and Dartnell dined with his counterpart Luis Dellepiane, one of the Argentine Army's more senior commanders and, crucially, a key confidant of the ailing former President Leandro Alem, still viewed as the eminence grise of Buenos Aires even in de jure retirement. At this dinner, Dellepiane and his other officers noted that their orders from Buenos Aires were to give the Chileans seven days to formally surrender from the start of the mutual ceasefire and suggested that Dartnell make plain to both civilian and military leaders in Santiago that this offer had an expiration date; playing on Dartnell's nationalist pride, he also gently encouraged him to consider the political implications of Peruvian and Bolivian soldiers in Santiago rather than the culturally and ethnically similar Argentines, or even the Americans.

In the end, even this carefully-worded threat was not necessary. Altamirano, who was the person actually in charge in Santiago at this point, was not one of Chile's most brilliant statesmen or generals but he was the man the country needed at that exact moment, recognizing the bleakness of his options with his famous quote, "I cannot keep my armies and Santiago fed with pride." Peace meant an end to starvation, skyrocketing prices and civil unrest; war meant societal collapse. Dartnell readily agreed and proposed that Dellepiane arrive in Santiago in a week's time to accept a formal surrender, which Dellepiane accepted.

With that, on April 28th, 1915, the war in Chile essentially ended on the ground; before long, it would end on paper. On May 2nd, General Wright arrived under flag of peace in Valparaiso with a small honor guard and traveled to Los Andes, marveling at the majestic beauty of the land but also stunned when he saw the crippling poverty of the people. Wright and Dellepiane's meeting at Los Andes was the first time that two field commanders of the two main Axis powers met in person; they would enter Santiago together and accept on May 5th in the Plaza de Armas the formal surrender of Chile to the United States and Argentina from Altamirano and Barros, with Wright declining to accept Altamirano's sword or pistol with the words, "A gentleman should keep his arms." Considering the intense fighting just days earlier, it was a remarkably polite scene, with the victors further ingratiating themselves to the local public by raising their flags alongside, rather than in lieu of, Chile's lone star banner.

Events after the war would of course be perhaps just as, if not more, complicated than the last months of the war itself, and there was still a formal - and punitive - peace treaty to be signed, but on May 5th, Armistice Day, there was an exhausted relief in Chile that the war was perhaps finally over, especially as the trade blockade ended and Wright urgently encouraged foreign relief organizations to attempt to stabilize the deterioriating situation in Santiago..."

- Between Two Chiles

 

[KingSweden24]

"...two armies smashed into one another about five kilometers north of Lebanon on the morning of May 2nd; this was the first time in over ten months that either side, with the exception of the action west of the Tennessee River, had genuinely fought a battle of maneuver, and the advantage flowed overwhelmingly to Lenihan and his forces. "With the river to our backs," he noted after the war, "there could be no retreat. We would have Lebanon, or we would be prisoners." By the evening the next day, Lenihan had, albeit with staggering casualties compared to his previously successful campaigns, seized Lebanon and her environs, and even more importantly the railroads passing east out of it through rural Wilson County towards Knoxville were in Yankee hands. Nashville had now been choked off from the east.

The next domino to fall came on the 5th, as the defenses of the Highland Rim around Ridgetop and Ashland City collapsed, with trenches overrun and foxholes and pillboxes cleared by flamethrower-toting "fireteams." Hundreds of American soldiers were killed as they stepped on landmines, but the press down along the Cumberland River and towards Nashville from north and north-west was unstoppable now as the thinned numbers of defenders were unable to sustain themselves against the tactical push to take advantage of Lenihan's breakthrough further east. At sunset on the 5th of May, [1] from atop a dusty ridgeline, General Farnsworth saw his prize that had eluded him for ten long, brutal, exhausting and dismaying months in the basin below him, barely visible through the smoke and ash - what remained of the city of Nashville, and his men marching towards it. In his diaries, he compared it to Moses seeing the Promised Land; he wept profusely and remarked that he could retire and die having secured his mission "at the death knell" of his impending replacement by Pershing, and indeed Farnsworth would tender his resignation shortly upon being relieved, too spent and emotionally broken by the hell of his command, and spent the rest of his life quietly as a military instructor and then civic leader..."

- Bleeding Heartland: The Midlands Front of the Great American War

"...the breaching of the Inner Line from three sides broke the spirits of the city's defenders, already thinned out to push the Yankee back across the Cumberland by Lebanon. Long's men were each handed a pistol and told that they were no longer supply escorts but city defenders; long after the war, Long estimated that all of two, not including himself, of his small platoon survived the hell that was the infamous "Seven Days" of Nashville.

The city had been badly damaged by long-distance artillery and aerial raids over the last ten months but even in early May was something resembling what had once been a city; after the Seven Days, it would be little but blackened rubble. The approaching Yankees announced their arrival with rolling artillery that now in closer proximity to the city shattered everything in their path; they were supported by death from the sky, with planes strafing Confederate lines and dropping small incendiary bombs. The worst came on the 7th, when the Yankee forces stopped at the northern outskirts of the city to wait; suddenly, gas canisters rained all over Nashville, clouds of white fumes rising up over the rubble and snaking through doorways and around corners to make eyes water and lungs burn. Despite months of fears over a gas attack, the defenders still did not have sufficient gas masks, and that was a big part of how Long was in the end captured. Caught in the midst of a bad cloud, he collapsed convinced he would die and seeing visions of Rose through the chaos; that he survived, albeit with a bad cough for the rest of his life, he took as a sign from Providence that he was meant for something greater. As the gas cleared, the Yankees pushed into the city, fighting building to building, sometimes even room to room and hand to hand. Long was discovered by a young lieutenant leaned against a wall, abandoned by his comrades, still nearly coughing up a lung, and he claimed that he survived only because his pistol was lying several feet from him rather than in his hand..."

- Every Man a Kingfish: The Life and Rise to Power of Huey Long

"...Buck's order to retreat towards Murfreesboro and beyond before Lenihan could cut off the routes of retreat to the city's southeast; the American army turned west anyways to march into the city and seize it. After seven long days of brutal urban warfare in which thousands of Confederate defenders were slaughtered and mere hundreds - including future President of the Confederate States Huey Long - taken prisoner, the city was in American hands, though what remained of Nashville could barely be called a city. After ten months, the campaign for Nashville was over. The Inner Line had failed, the city destroyed, and the Army of Tennessee broken..."

- Making Sense of the Senseless: The Great American War at 100

[1] Subtlety, what is it?

 

[KingSweden24]

"...decisive naval battles do not always end a war, like Actium or Yaeyama - sometimes, as at Trafalgar, they merely make a strategic disadvantage insurmountable. With the assets in place between the two fleets at hand in the western Atlantic waters off the coast of South Carolina in the first days of May of 1915, these thoughts were plainly on everybody's mind. A defeat for the United States would erase in an instant all their gains over the previous year and threaten once again their access to Nicaragua and force a white peace or ugly settlement that would suggest the war had been worth the trouble for Dixie in the first place; conversely, if the Confederacy lost, that effectively spelled the end of the country as a naval force, and made the course of the war from then on more or less inevitable. The stakes could not have been higher.

The emotions on both sides ran high as well. Hobson's journal on the evening of May 4th suggested that he felt tremendous angst at what could be waiting at Port Royal when his fleet returned from Bermuda, as if he somehow sensed that something earth-shattering awaited him the following morning. The attempts to force the Yankee fleet away from Dixie shores had been successful, but his goal to force a decisive battle on the high seas had not, and now he needed to restock his fuel and other supplies for what he anticipated would be a second lengthy game of cat-and-mouse with his quarry.

Belknap's fleet had followed Hobson back to the coast from a northeasterly position, just within telescope range, but submarines had been deployed to fan out on either side of it in order to rapidly break off if needed, and late at night on the 4th, with the Combined Fleet's guide lights all that was visible on the black of sea beneath the stars, one of the American submarines did just so, heading away so as to not give away its position before sending a coded message via radio telegraphy. The Confederates had been more or less aware that there were submarines present in the vicinity besides their own, but had not wanted to give away the position of their own Seawolves and thus had not engaged; they also knew that there were signals being broadcast between Belknap's vessels, but until the night of the 4th there could not have been another fleet close enough for them to be broadcasting to. With Port Royal approaching, that was no longer the case, and the broadcast was heard - the Confederate fleet was back, its course appeared to be directing it straight for its supply facilities at Port Royal Roads, and the United States would never have a better chance to gain her coup de main.

Task Force C was divided into three squadrons, or "columns" as Admiral Rodgers referred to them as in his memoirs, and these squadrons were to form a semicircle to box in the Confederate fleet while Belknap blocked their avenues of escape. The Battle of Yaeyama where an entire Spanish fleet had been sunk had demonstrated the advantage of battleships being able to fire upon an approaching enemy broadside, and Murdock intended to create a cauldron at sea in which the Confederate vessels would have fire rained down upon them to the point that their operational discipline broke and they attempted to escape. The success of a similar strategy at Desventuradas influenced this thinking; as good as the Chilean fleet had been, and as capable of a commander as the late Admiral Prat had been, the Combined Fleet was much more formidable, and something similar and more overwhelming would be needed to permanently end its threat to American shipping both across the Atlantic and via the Caribbean.

The morning of May 5th, 1915 was a sunny, brisk day, with only a few clouds and an ominously calm sea. The shore was partially visible on the far western horizon to Confederate spotters, augmented by a handful of seagulls swirling ahead. Hobson would in later years recall feeling strangely at ease in the first hour after sunrise as the South Carolina coast became visible to the naked eye, and he enjoyed a dawn breakfast with his senior officers aboard the Virginia where they debated where they would attempt to force Belknap. Again, Hobson's journals reveal his line of thinking - he was jotting out a plan of resupply where vessels would enter Port Royal two at a time for a quick turnaround while the rest of the fleet anchored defensively off Hilton Head in case Belknap's squadron attempted to trap them within the harbor, and planned to spend no more than two days restocking. Within minutes, that plan was completely shot to pieces.

As he finished his breakfast, Hobson and his immediate subordinate Captain John Reynolds were summoned hurriedly to come up to the bridge - there was an urgent problem, two in fact. The first was that Belknap's fleet had apparently split in two, with half of his squadron now sailing slightly southwards to the rear of their fleet. The second was that there were ships on the horizon, west and southwest of the Confederates, the smoke of their boilers visible against the pale blue morning sky, cutting ahead of Hobson's fleet that had the sun to its back, which meant they'd seen him well before he had seen them. The trap was sprung - the Battle of Hilton Head was beginning..."

- Hell at Sea: The Naval Campaigns of the Great American War

"...for Murdock, the task now that the two fleets had spotted one another was to cut off all of the Confederate routes of escape. He assumed, correctly, that if Hobson could not sail into Port Royal Roads as intended then he was likelier to break for the closer and better-equipped naval facilities of Savannah. It was for that reason that Roosevelt and his C Squadron had been positioned the most southerly, to arrest any movement towards Savannah. Meanwhile, A and B Squadrons continued to shift into a line immediately west and northwest of the Combined Fleet, approximately twelve kilometers off the coast of Hilton Head Island and the mouth of the Roads, just barely out of coastal artillery range but sufficient to assess any Confederate routes. The T, as it were, had been successfully crossed, as Hobson and Noronha realized to their mounting horror. With Belknap's squadron split in half on their rear, the "cauldron at sea" had been nearly perfectly formed.

The question for Hobson then became where exactly to press next - did he attempt to direct his fleet to make a break for safety in Charleston or Savannah, or did he try to force his way through the line to Port Royal? The former would still sustain tremendous damage to his fleet, while simply delaying the inevitable deciding battle when he elected to leave either of those harbors. No, the battle needed to be fought now, he decided, and with that Hobson sent the signal for his fleet to form two triangular wedge-shaped squadrons to better defend one another in cross-firing and sail for relative gaps between A and B Squadrons, hoping to scramble the Yankee formations and then sweep around to pick off the various squadrons in detail once the breach occurred.

As the fleets entered firing range, Murdock sent out his final broadcast - "Leave no enemy afloat, gentlemen!" - and the battle was on. The A Squadron opened up with a violent broadside aimed straight for the middle of Hobson's nearer squadron, peppering repeatedly with all guns. The Baton Rouge exploded immediately from a direct strike to its boiler, and a magazine explosion aboard the aging Wilmington tore through much of the vessel and it went up within minutes, both ships with all hands. Hobson's frantic radio signals commanded his ships to maintain discipline and fire at whatever was in range that they could "put more than two guns on."

This meant that the C Squadron, positioned to the side of the southern squadron, was the most exposed of Task Force C. Two deck guns of its lead ship, Montana, were blown clear off, one of them slamming into the bridge and breaking Commander Roosevelt's leg while pinning him to the bulkhead, leaving the leg badly injured and barely usable for the rest of his life. [1] The pre-dreadnought Maine, meanwhile, took three torpedoes beneath its waterline and it broke away from the line to get as close to land as possible before her captain Joseph Ward elected to scuttle her, thus probably rescuing most of her crew of five hundred men from a watery grave (though many of them would be captured by horrified Confederate soldiers watching the engagement from shore), and the Duluth went up in a fiery ball from a direct magazine strike that ignited all the ammunition aboard. Seeing success in attacking this point in the line, Hobson ordered both his squadrons start to swing southwards to attack C Squadron outright, identifying this southern approach as his point of attack to break out.

This was what Murdock had anticipated, but as he made the order for his and Rodgers' squadrons to start turning around, a shell clipped the top of the bridge of the Vermont and it nearly caved in on itself; two long shards of glass passed through his back and throat, killing him nearly instantly. "Admiral down!" came the frantic message from the Vermont to the rest of the fleet, and with that Rodgers was now in command, and Murdock's trusty lieutenant elected to continue tightening the coil, bringing his B Squadron in particular around so it could flank Hobson's northernly squadron.

As all this was ongoing closer to the shore, Belknap was speeding his boats up to their maximum cruising ability, getting them pointed two-and-two towards the back of Hobson's fleet. The nearest vessels to him, were the Brazilian squadron under the command of Noronha, and III Squadron found itself in something unexpected - a dreadnought battle, with Pennsylvania and Connecticut exchanging duel of shells and torpedoes with the Rio de Janeiro at ever-closing distances. The Rio was the pride of the Brazilian fleet, their most advanced and sophisticated vessel, much like Ol' Penn was for Belknap and the Americans; the two dreadnoughts increasingly split themselves off from their support squadrons as Belknap's and Noronha's escort cruisers tore into each other to their rear. The dance of the dreadnoughts was almost its own separate battle, moving southeastwards (historians have debated if Noronha was attempting to flee and leave the Confederates to their fate, something Noronha would until his death deny) but despite his flagship taking severe damage, the Pennsylvania was bigger, faster, and better equipped, and after nearly three hours finally could break off as the Rio began to lilt on its side, with too many strikes having flooded her portside boiler and punctured her waterline. Most of the Brazilian crew was able to evacuate, and Noronha himself was pulled out of a lifeboat, humiliated, to surrender his sword to Belknap on the deck of the Pennsylvania as they steamed towards the rest of the ongoing battle..."

- The Fourth Branch: A Comprehensive History of the United States Navy

"...as morning turned to afternoon, all that could be smelled was smoke and melting metal; decks were strewn with dismembered limbs from sailors torn apart from direct strikes and pieces of their ships tearing through them. The fires were so hot men scampered about shirtless trying to put them out, the smoke so thick and black that crew could barely see two feet ahead of them, and hundreds of men on the Confederate vessels are believed to have asphyxiated rather than drowned.

The attempt to punch south to Savannah through the C Squadron of the Yankee fleet was a bad gamble by Hobson; unbeknownst to him, it had been what the American Admiral Murdock, mere moments before he had been martyred by a direct strike on his flagship's bridge, had planned for, and the other squadrons of the Yankee fleet circled around to successfully encircle Hobson from behind as the fleet he had pursue to the Bahamas came to strike from the east. Committed to his decision, Hobson had no choice but to continue to attempt to run the gauntlet and break through at the weakest link in the American chain.

This is not to say that he did not have some success; the Milwaukee went down from two direct hits from Virginia and Texas, and the scout cruisers Marblehead and Salem were blown out of the water, the latter briefly appearing airborne with flailing bodies of sailors spinning through the air from the force of the blast. The casualties taken by the American fleet were disproportionately concentrated in her C Squadron, and Hobson's dogged attempt to break through there were a reason why.

But it became quickly clear that the Americans had no intention to let him escape, and the A and B Squadrons were by early afternoon able to isolate Hobson's northern squadron, already depleted by Belknap isolating and destroying the Brazilians to their east. Here, the superior quality of the Yankee ships reigned supreme; the battlecruisers Lexington and Constellation were of better quality than the Confederate battleship Georgia and close to the dreadnought Tennessee, and these two vessels became their prime target as California with her escorts sought to pick apart the cruisers and destroyers of the Confederate fleet, successfully sinking one after the other Pensacola, Nashville and Tallahassee. Hobson thus had a fateful choice to make - did he attempt to turn around and rescue his rear squadron just as he punched through American line, or did he leave them? He elected to leave them, and at 2 o' clock the first Confederate dreadnought, Tennessee, took its fatal hit starboard midships and sank in fifteen minutes, with most of her crew of eight hundred unable to evacuate in time. Minutes later, Georgia's magazine detonated, breaking the ship in two and taking all hands with her.

Belknap's second squadron, led by the Minnesota and battlecruiser Ranger, at this point slammed into Hobson's southern squadron, with the dead Murdock's A Squadron catching her from the rear. The Beaumont and Durham were sunk within minutes of each other, and the badly-damaged Montana, with her commanding officer Franklin Roosevelt - cousin of the famed American press baron Theodore - barking orders despite being trapped against a bulkhead with his leg broken, was able to get up behind Alabama and blast her deck guns off with several well-timed broadsides before sending a shell straight through her bridge, rendering her nearly inoperable and drifting out to sea a smoking, flaming husk rapidly being abandoned by her men until she sank mercifully half an hour later. Hobson brought his Virginia around to duel with the Vermont, correctly identifying the dreadnoughts as his biggest opponent at sea, running down to the deck himself to bark commands at the gunners with his torn coat sleeve wrapped around his face as a makeshift mask, his face drenched in sweat and blood.

From that vantage point, he was able to watch Charleston start to sink from the aft, her nose pointing into the sky before snapping in half and plunging into the depths with her crew helplessly bobbing in the sea around her. A shell struck the side of the Virginia and Hobson was thrown from the deck; how he survived is a minor miracle, but when the battle was over he was pulled from the sea aboard the Omaha, dangling from a piece of debris. The Missoula erupted in a ball of flame, raining its shrapnel down on the screaming survivors flailing to survive in the flame-strewn water as oil caught fire around them, but that would be the last American vessel sunk on the day. Bobbing in the water, Hobson watched with horror as the Virginia took direct hits from submarines and destroyers along with the Vermont and started to show signs that it was done for; the dreadnought would take on water just as she breached the American lines and rolled over on her side. Despite taking nearly an hour to sink, only a hundred and twenty of her crew of nine hundred survived the wreckage and the bloody terror that awaited them in the burning ocean outside.

The Texas, the unlucky pre-dreadnought nicknamed "Ol Hoodo," was the only boat to escape the gauntlet, taking several severe hits but managing to steam aggressively out of gun range and the American fleet commander Rodgers electing instead to sink whatever was left in his cauldron rather than pursue. The "cursed ship" of the Confederate fleet was, somehow, the only vessel that day that was not sunk besides four Seawolf submarines. That meant that, in all, three irreplaceable dreadnoughts, one battleship, ten cruisers, and over a dozen Seawolves had been lost, along with one Brazilian dreadnought and three cruisers. It was one of the most devastating defeats at sea possibly in the history of naval warfare, all within spitting distance of the fleet's chief wartime port. It was perhaps not an exaggeration when American Admiral William Sims, who had helped plan the strategy that led to the Battle of Hilton Head, described it as "an Actium of the Americas" - it is hard to think of another battle that so decisively defined the course of a war to come..."

- To the Knife: The Confederacy at War 1914-15

[1] Sorry to Team "Olympic Sprinter FDR", but the parallelism/dark humor here was too good to pass up

End of Part IX: Landfall​

 

[KingSweden24]

The Battle of Hilton Head, alternatively but not commonly known as the Battle of Port Royal, was a major naval engagement on May 5, 1915 in the immediate vicinity of Port Royal Sound in South Carolina, CSA during the Great American War. Fought between the two fleets of the United States and a combined sortie of Confederate and Brazilian vessels known as the Combined Fleet, the engagement was, at the time it occurred, possibly the largest naval battle in recorded history, only the second to feature dreadnoughts on both sides (after the Battle of the Desventuradas a year earlier between the United States and Chile). The battle was one of the most lopsided and decisive defeats by a naval force in history - of the Combined Fleet, only a single battleship and four submarines was able to escape un-sunk, and an estimated eleven thousand Confederate and Brazilian soldiers died while countless others fled to shore or were captured.

The battle occurred in a strategic context of early 1915 in which the Bloc Sud powers of the Confederate States, Brazil and Mexico had successfully begun a campaign of harassment and interdiction against US shipping in the Caribbean and, to a lesser extent, central and north Atlantic by way of increasingly deploying battleship assets out of port and a strategically novel campaign of semi-unrestricted submarine warfare. The United States, having secured naval supremacy in the Pacific over the prior year, elected in early 1915 to seek a decisive coup de main against the Confederate First Fleet of Admiral Richmond Hobson operating out of the vicinity of Charleston and Savannah - as it turned out, the protected sound of Port Royal in between the two. To this end, the US Navy sent a massive task force under Admiral Joseph Murdock from the Pacific through to the Caribbean in early April, and dispatched a smaller fleet under Admiral Reggie Belknap out of New England at the same time to lure the Confederates into an engagement. Concerned about the massing of American force in the Caribbean, Hobson joined his fleet up with a Brazilian squadron under Admiral Isaias de Noronha off the Florida coast and sailed north to respond to Belknap, unaware that Murdock's fleet was in the Bahamas, and not near the Virgin Islands as he believed.

Belknap successfully drew Hobson out to Bermuda, giving Murdock time to position his fleet to intercept Hobson on his return to port when the Confederate admiral deduced that he was being forced into a battle out at sea that was not to his advantage. Upon returning to South Carolina, his Combined Fleet had its T crossed both from in front by Murdock and behind by Belknap, who had trailed him back at a distance, creating a "cauldron at sea," as it would later be known. In a massive, daylong battle featuring more tonnage than any before in history, the Combined Fleet was decisively eliminated; attempts to break for Port Royal and Savannah were both unsuccessful. Both commanding admirals were captured, with Hobson pulled from the sea after being blown from the deck of his flagship by a shell; Murdock, the American fleet admiral, was killed early in the engagement when the bridge of his flagship was nearly totally destroyed. Only the CSS Texas was able to successfully break through, though with severe damage, and escape to port in Savannah.

The decisive loss of three of the Confederacy's four dreadnoughts, and one of its two pre-dreadnought battleships (the Confederacy had captured two American battleships at Baltimore, but they were being held in reserve in Mobile under repair after taking severe damage) essentially eliminated the Confederacy as a viable naval force for the remainder of the war (the fourth dreadnought, Arkansas, would be severely damaged and captured in the Battle of the Florida Straits three months later) and badly set back the ability of Brazil to project power in the Caribbean; indeed, it was the first and only major naval engagement between the United States and Brazil in the entirety of the war. By a quirk of fate, it occurred on the same date that the major breakthrough into Nashville occurred in the Midlands Theater of the war, and "Black May" is a term used in the Confederacy to this day for the moment when the war turned irreversibly against them with the twin defeats. As for the United States, it remains celebrated as a foundational military triumph, with the deceased Murdock in particular enjoying the legacy of national martyrdom. Internationally, it remains one of the most studied battles strategically and tactically, as there was no particular mistake made by Hobson's maneuvers and due to the sheer firepower involved; lessons drawn from Hilton Head would prove highly influential in the naval battles of the Mediterranean during the Central European War.

Today, Hilton Head Island in South Carolina remains a national military cemetery, with several thousand of the remains of the Confederate war dead from the battle buried there (though it is rumored that unidentified Americans and Brazilians are entombed in unmarked graves there, too). On the centennial of the battle, American President Brian Schweitzer became the first-ever American President to visit the Hilton Head National War Cemetery; indeed, only token dignitaries had traveled there on previous anniversaries, taken as a sign of warming relations between Richmond and Philadelphia.

(I didn't quite get the Confederate flag looking the way I'd hoped, oh well)
(Yes that is the USS Arizona burning as my stand-in for the sinking Virginia; if you're ever in Hawai'i, Pearl Harbor is worth seeing)

 

[KingSweden24]

The Battle of Nashville was a major military engagement of the Great American War, fought between July 1914 and May 1915 in the Midlands Theater. Also known as the Siege of Nashville and in some select historiography as The Graveyard of the Old Confederacy, it is widely regarded as the pivotal campaign of the conflict in the Midlands Theater and perhaps the entire war. The battle was typified by gradually encroaching United States offensives against the greater Nashville area in the Cumberland Valley of central Tennessee, contested against a major Confederate force in defense along with support from Mexican divisions; as such, the battle was defined by grueling trench warfare and the use of novel weapons such as aerial attacks, chemical warfare via phosphene gas attacks, and the deployment of rudimentary landships and flamethrowers for trench clearance. It was a decisive American victory which effectively ended the Confederate defense of central and western Tennessee and is regarded as breaking the back of the Confederate war effort.

Following the Confederate retreat from central Kentucky in May and June of 1914, the key railroad and manufacturing center of Nashville became the focus of all offensive and defensive operations in the Midlands. The fighting is generally broken up into three phases; the first was engaged along the Outer Line of defenses stretching from the Donelson-Henry fortress complex in northwestern Tennessee between the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers to Glasgow, Kentucky, a period running approximately from July to November, when the Outer Line of trenches was largely abandoned in favor of the Inner Line, located entirely in Tennessee behind the Cumberland River and along the Highland Rim of forested hills and elevated terrain forming a rough semicircle around the industrialized Nashville Basin. The United States initially appeared to make genuine progress in the closing months of 1914, but in February 1915 a counteroffensive on the Cumberland drove the United States back across the river to the proximity of Clarksville, with heavy casualties at the same time that a potential threat from the Memphis area to Confederate lines was defeated. This set the stage for the third and final phase of the ten-month battle, in which American efforts were reconcentrated with a campaign of attrition at a weak point in the Inner Line around Gallatin along with aerial terror bombing of Nashville itself having already begun in December against industrial and civilian targets. A breakthrough on this point was achieved by General Michael Lenihan's 2nd Army in late April and on May 1st he crossed the Cumberland River in the direction of Lebanon, successfully pulling several divisions of Confederate defenders east; exhausted, much of the remaining defenses collapsed on May 5th (the same day as the decisive naval defeat at Hilton Head) and American forces successfully secured Nashville after seven days of vicious urban fighting that destroyed much of what was left of the city.

The battle was one of the bloodiest of the war; roughly a tenth of Confederate war dead and sixth of total aggregated casualties were realized there, while one in five of every casualty sustained by the United States occurred in the Nashville Campaign. Much like at the Susquehanna and the Potomac, the importance of artillery and machine guns for defensive purposes were proven again, though the gapingly disproportionate American casualties of previous battles were not as obvious here and it was the first genuinely decisive defeat in terms of personnel killed or wounded for the CSA. The violence of the fighting, particularly atrocities against a large city's civilian population to break the defenses, became notorious and were a preview for further battles in Tennessee and Georgia over the following year and a half, particularly the Sack of Atlanta.

 

[KingSweden24]

Denouement - 5.5.15​

News traveled slower in 1915 than today, but it did not take long for the gravity of what had happened at Hilton Head to wash up on Dixie shores along with hundreds of drowned bodies, just as the revelation of the collapse of the Inner Line and Yankee soldiers pushing their way into Nashville itself arrived before long. For those who really understood sea power theory, there was a certain stunned resignation to the decisive, overwhelming blow the Yankee navy had doled out upon the Confederate troops, but the mood of the general public was more apoplectic terror than anything else. The twin defeats, which overshadowed the ceasefire agreed to by Chile upon the same day half a world away, were a gut punch to Confederate pride and swagger. The first months of 1915 had after all seen successful counteroffensives on the Occoquan and on the Cumberland to limit American advances, and defeats in West Tennessee had pinned the enemy in Memphis with their backs to the river, while at sea the Wolfpack strategy had seemed to turn the tide in Confederate favor. All that was now gone, the cautious optimism of the first four months of the year drowned along with ten thousand Confederate lives off the coast of South Carolina.

The twin defeats occurred twenty months almost to the day after the war had started in September 1913; during the War of Secession, still considered by Confederate leadership the blueprint of their campaign, at the twenty month mark they had scored their victory-securing triumphs in Kentucky and Pennsylvania and had just repelled Union forces at Fredericksburg in a bloody, violent debacle for their foe. The realization sank in that this was not the same spineless Yankee of fifty years prior but rather a vengeful one, and many officers before long expressed regret at the savagery of Plan HHH and the surprise attack on Baltimore, now fearing what the response would be and wondering if Nashville was simply a remarkably grim aperatif before the main course arrived in southern Virginia, northern Alabama and central Georgia.

There was something curiously providential and mystical about all three of those irreversible setbacks occurring on the same day, May the 5th, and the date would carry some small degree of superstition for the war generation and many of their children. It was as if God had chosen that day to be the day of Confederate reckoning for some indeterminable sin, and some began to openly wonder for the first time out loud whether it was the institution of slavery that had marked Dixie as cursed, especially as the hell on earth that the Yankee would visit upon them over the rest of the war became more and more clear. It was strange to think, though nobody could have realized, how May the 5th was providential to them in another way, for without a victory on far-off Mexican soil on that same day by the French soldiers of the long-dead Napoleon III, fifty-three years earlier, the Confederacy would never have been recognized or supported from the south.

In that half century since much had changed around the world, socially, technologically, and politically, but the immense amount of cultural pride in the Old South had remained the same, especially over its hierarchical, slave-fueled society. Nashville and Hilton Head were not the end of that, but they were certainly the beginning of the end, rather than the end of the beginning. They were the first unraveling, the first sentence of the denouement of a now-unmourned civilization gone with the wind. The sense across the white Confederacy in the Black May of 1915 were ones of ominous, looming fear for a reason - everybody could sense that the war's tide had shifted for good, and that the "high-water mark" of the Bloc Sud had long come and gone on the hills north of Nashville, the beaches of South Carolina and the mountains of Chile.

The war did not end on May 5th, 1915, unfortunately for the hundreds of thousands of souls still to perish - but the war, for all intents and purposes, was from there on out over but for the fighting.

FIN​

 

[GDIS Pathe]

As the TL comes to a close, have every single US Presidential election from the Panic of 1870 sundering the Republican Party between the Radicals and its Liberals ushering the Presidencies of Hoffman and Hendricks, to the 20 years of Liberal rule that the Blaine Administration so narrowly inaugurated. Custer narrow election victory, and short-lived Presidency, to the Liberal Party's golden boy who saw his party hold the White House for three terms and twelve years, helped by his own timely assassination, and Foraker's razor thin election victory of Uncle Adlai in 1912.